BATON ROUGE – The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development and Baton Rouge City-Parish are teaming up with Waze, the free, real-time crowdsourced navigation app powered by the world’s largest community of drivers. Through this free partnership, DOTD and the City-Parish will join 65 other communities around the world as global partners within the Waze Connected Citizens Program, which was established by Waze to facilitate two-way data sharing of publicly available traffic information between government agencies and citizens. This partnership promotes greater efficiency and safer roads for citizens across the world – and now both on state routes in Louisiana and throughout East Baton Rouge Parish.

The Waze Connected Citizens Program provides municipalities, states, and countries with a view into real-time road activity, which helps drivers make decisions that impact travel. With a foundation of two-way data sharing, Waze provides partners with real-time, anonymous, incident and traffic information directly from its users (known as “Wazers”). In exchange, DOTD and the City-Parish will provide real-time, government-reported construction, crash and road closure data to Waze to create a succinct and thorough overview of current road conditions. Moving forward and in the coming months, both DOTD and the City-Parish will be working to integrate Waze data streams into each organization’s traffic management system and related traffic monitoring applications, such as DOTD’s 511la.org and the City-Parish’s traffic incident map.

Waze data should be available on www.511la.org by the end of the summer.

“This level of data sharing between Waze, DOTD and the City-Parish will play an important role for travelers throughout the state as DOTD continues to incorporate the latest technology into our Traffic Management Center,” Sec. Shawn Wilson, Ph.D., said. “I firmly believe in the power of data and information which, when provided to citizens in a real-time manner such as this, will help travelers make more informed travel decisions and have a more enjoyable and safer commute. Through this partnership we are taking the next step in our efforts to provide as much information as possible for the day-to-day commuter, travelers passing through our state and to those in need of real-time information during emergency situations such as flooding, winter storms and evacuations.”

“Through this exciting partnership with Waze and our partners in traffic management at the state, we are taking the next step to adopt a data-driven approach to reducing congestion here in Baton Rouge and create safer driving conditions for all our citizens,” Baton Rouge Mayor-President Kip Holden said. “Much in the same way we achieved a Top 10 Digital City ranking last year, my administration is laser-focused on how we can best utilize technology and digital platforms such as Waze to better connect with citizens and, in this case, both provide and consume real-time traffic data that works together to form one of the world’s most accurate overviews of local traffic conditions.”

“The Waze map evolves with every driver and data point it receives, promoting safer roads and sharing more knowledge with Wazers about potential delays to their commutes,” said Paige Fitzgerald, Waze Connected Citizens Program Program Manager. “The Waze Connected Citizens Program yields even more data, giving citizens in these areas a greater ability to circumvent road closures and traffic jams within the app. The immense levels and layers of traffic-related data now available in Baton Rouge and throughout Louisiana will serve as key catalysts in helping drivers get to where they need to go on the most optimal routes possible.”

According to Waze:

New Orleans has more than 53,000 monthly active users who collectively drive more than 15.7 million kilometers (9.76 million miles) with the app each month.

Baton Rouge has more than 35,000 monthly active users who collectively drive more than 11.6 million kilometers (7.2 million miles)with the app each month.

The mission of the Waze Connected Citizens Program is to help users of the app, as well as cities and citizens, collaborate to improve the accuracy, timeliness and availability of traffic conditions and answer the question, “What’s happening on our roads right now, and where?”